UK Album Charts 1977

I read the 33-1/3 book on Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman and thought it kind of remarkable that Marquee Moon made the top 30 in the UK album charts. Thanks to Official Charts you can see the top 60 from each week. This mainly doesn’t include compilations or soundtracks (The Muppet Show was an exception since I was amused to see one of my childhood albums was so wildly successful). I gotta say it’s pretty jarring when it transitions from a The Muppets track to Derek And Clive, which is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing drunken stream-of-consciousness comedy, peppered with the C-word. Wikipedia says they were “far too crude for a mainstream audience.” Yet 8 weeks on the top albums chart shows otherwise. Also, people who complained about the Muppet Show reboot a couple years ago because it was too “adult” clearly missed the adult humor subtexts in the original. Check out “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” Or is it just my own warped mind?

This makes me feel old. If I was writing a similar piece in 1977, I would be reminiscing about music from 40 years previous, 1937.

I made a playlist of some of the albums I hadn’t listened to as much. ABBA’s original “I’m A Marionette” just as weirdly wonderful as Ghost’s cover. That bass in “Dreams” is like being swaddled in black velvet. I get flashbacks to my childhood of laying in the backseat of my grandfather’s Lincoln Continental hearing that song and gazing at blue sky and white clouds through the window. However aside from “You Make Loving Fun” and “Gold Dust Woman,” the rest of Rumours leaves me cold. I’d argue that artists like Fleetwood Mac made less consistent albums than some of the punk/art rock crowd.

Given the colossal reverence for Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, it’s interesting to see that Jean Michel Jarre was vastly more popular at the time, arguably making much less accessible electronic music.

While the Sex Pistols album did well, and both Stranglers albums did better than I would have expected, punk hardly slayed prog. People were buying the sh*t out of Yes and Pink Floyd albums. Even Camel and Utopia made the top 30! The live Genesis album also reached number 4 and charted for 17 weeks, before they went pop. Speaking of prog pop, Electric Light Orchestra’sOut Of The Blue holds up quite well. It’s not just me and childhood nostalgia, as they were recently inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and AXS TV just featured a performance by an ELO tribute band! Same with Queen, I was impressed by the note-perfect rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by the Almost Queen tribute band, which aired on AXS TV last week. I’d be tempted to make a road trip to Michigan to catch them later this year if I knew they’d play a favorite deep cut, “It’s Late” from News Of The World.